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My father, born 1921, went to the Como Park in St. Paul, Minnesota every Sunday after church until his mother died in 1931. The park was beautiful and the outing was enjoyable until they visited the zoo portion. Seeing the bears and lions caged, like in this photo, scared him for life -- never went to a zoo again for as long as he lived. Not even the "free ranging" zoo. I think the onlookers here have the same thoughts.

This appears to be the same site as the current zoo, in Overton Park. As awful as the cage is, it was a big improvement over the previous accommodations: "The idea for the Memphis Zoo began as early as 1904, when Col. Robert Galloway started lobbying for funds to build a home for a Southern black bear named Natch. The bear, who was the mascot of the Memphis Turtles baseball team, was being kept chained to a tree in Overton Park." (www.memphiszoo.org/history)

The zoo has grown into one of the best small zoos in the country. It still sits in Overton Park in midtown Memphis. The zoo is now home to a few hundred animals, including a pair of pandas entrusted to them by the Chinese government. The pandas live in much plusher digs than their distant cousins here.

Shorpy.com | History in HD is a vintage photo archive featuring thousands of high-definition images from the 1850s to 1960s. (Available as fine-art prints from the Shorpy Archive.) The site is named after Shorpy Higginbotham, a teenage coal miner who lived 100 years ago.